Monday, 6 July 2015

Today we've got another taster in the run up to the Apocalypse track at Nine Worlds Geekfest. This time, a series of apocalyptic poems by Matt Wieteska. Matt is one of the writers behind, among other things, Zombies, Run!, an app that takes your regular morning jog and turns into a harrowing dash for survival. Matt is going to be at Nine Worlds this year talking to us about zombies and apocalypse survival. Come see him at our Zombie Breakfast and Ragnarok sessions!

Friday, 3 July 2015

It’s hot. Skin meltingly, eye-searingly, hot. While all sane
people are moaning about this and complaining that they have to do anything
except lie naked in a bath full of ice, there’s always a few smug people who
say “It’s nice to get a bit of sun! It’s no big deal! It’s not the end of the
world!” These people somehow think that being soaked in the radiation of a
gigantic ball of nuclear fire is somehow okay just because it’s there every
day. Well those sun drenched fools are wrong, and these stories prove it!

This story about a mad missionary walking a post-apocalyptic
Earth takes place in a world where the sun has expanded and the planet has been
singed to a crisp. Cities have burned and the seas have boiled away, while
survivors scrabble about on the dusty ocean floor. The only greenery to be
found here is at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The Midnight Sun

One of the bleakest episodes of The Twilight Zone (a series
not afraid of going extremely bleak when it’s in the mood). The Earth has come
off its axis and is drifting closer and closer towards the sun, resulting in a
deadly heat for the people that live there.

There’s no adventure here, no hope, just a woman alone in a
flat while the world melts around her. You can probably relate.

Doctor Who

The world has ended twice in Doctor Who, and both times it
was for the same reason. The first time is in The Ark, in which
the TARDIS lands on a generation ship fleeing an Earth that is falling into the
sun, and the second time is in The End of
the World, when the sun finally expands and blows the Earth to smithereens.

In this 1961 movie it’s a nuclear blast that sends us
hurtling towards the fun, with orange infused footage going somewhere to make
the film feel as hot and sweaty as, y’know, reality is right now. It being the
sixties they decide that the solution to the problems created by all these
nuclear bombs is more nuclear bombs, but by the end of the film we never find
out if the Earth is saved or doomed (although it has to be said, very few
storytellers leave the ending ambiguous when they intended for something really
good to have happened).

A film I originally only knew about thanks to a trailer on
the Super Mario Bros. VHS that I owned, because I liked the film. There, I said
it. The plan is pretty much identical to that of Sunshine (which doesn’t make the list because the sun is going cold
in that one) – go to the sun and drop enough nukes on it that a solar flare
will point away from the planet.

I’ve not seen this yet, but one day I plan to make it part
of a Nicholas Cage apocalyptic double bill with Left Behind. A kid can predict the future. The future is a solar
flare going to roast the planet. That’s all I know about this one. I bet
Nicholas Cage is great in it though.

Chris Farnell is the
author of Dirty Work and Mark
II. He is writing this blog as a terribly exploitative way of drawing your
attention to the newly released timetable for the Apocalypse track at
this year’s Nine Worlds Geekfest, where there will be panels discussing
post-apocalyptic survival, zombies, and how useful our stories are going to be
when an actual apocalypse hits. Come along and bring plenty of sun cream.

Friday, 13 March 2015

"Not an apocalypse. There had always been plenty of those - small apocalypses, not the full shilling at all, fake apocalypses: apocryphal apocalypses. Most of them had been back in the old days, when the world as in 'end of the world' was often objectively no wider than a few villages and a clearing in the forest.

And those little worlds had ended. But there had always been somewhere else. There had been the horizon, to start with. The fleeing refugees would find that the world was bigger than they'd thought. A few villages in a clearing? Hah, how could they have been so stupid! Now they knew it was a whole island! Of course, there was that horizon again..."

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Regular readers of the blog will notice it hasn't been properly updated in, well, a long time. Work's overtaken it somewhat, and I've been getting involved in other things. To keep track of what I'm up to these days, please check out the new official Chris Farnell site for information on my latest projects, as well as regular begging for work.

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

The environment is important kids, we need it t live and
junk. Film makers for the last couple of decades have been super keen to teach
kids the importance of looking after the environment, apparently missing the fact
that all their children are going to hear is “Because Mummy and Daddy drive
cars, you and all the whales are going to die!”

What’s worse however, is that most of these films, one way
or another, end up undermining the very message they’re trying to spread.

This is my personal favourite on this list, mainly because,
like most Pixar films, I can’t sit through it without bursting into tears like
some sort of baby. The film opens on possibly one of the most kid friendly
apocalypses you can imagine. No seas of acid, no global warming, no meteorites
or super strong rabies variants. Nope, this is the trashpocalypse. The Earth
came to a halt because there was too much littering.

This is fine if you’re a kid, as “not littering” is
something you can realistically contribute to, unlike global warming, which you
just have to watch in despair as your mum drives you to school in a 4x4.

The Day After
Tomorrow

This film is basically Independence Day but with the
gigantic alien spaceships being replaced with really bad weather. At the start
we see the noble Dennis Quaid scientist desperately trying to persuade the evil
politicians to sign Kyoto and not kill us all. They don’t and we all die.

Unfortunately, any moral you might have gleaned from this
film is spoiled by the fact that the science is terrible. There are scenes where see people literally run away from the cold and escape from
it by shutting a door just in time.
In one seen we see a cold breeze literally freeze an American flag in mid
flight, ignoring the fact that to do that the flag would have to be so damp it
would be unable to fly anyway.

Fern Gulley: The Last
Rainforest

Not to be confused with Gurn Fully, the tale of a man who
pulls funny faces, then is forced to find his way to the home of the wind gods
with his tongue hanging out after his face gets stuck that way. Also not to be
confused with the film Avatar, which ripped this film off so hard it really is
amazing that the Robin Williams bat didn’t sue James Cameron.

The message of the film amounts to “cutting down the
Rainforest is bad”. The message stumbles a little bit though, since it turns
out the creatures of the rainforest have the power to reduce a human being to
the size of an insect at will.

Faced with power like that, you can forget chopping down the
rainforest. We should nuke it from orbit just to be sure.

Free Willy

Free Willy is a touching story about the importance of
looking after wild life and protecting the world around us. It shows us that
keeping a whale in captivity is wrong and that it should be released into the
wild where it can run (or swim) free.

Of course, this is slightly undermined in two ways. Firstly,
not a single kid saw that film and came away not wanting their very own trained
killer whale. Two, Willy, with his damaged dorsal fin and psychological damage
from years in captivity, would almost certainly die when he reached the ocean.

The Simpsons Movie

Back when it was good the Simpsons often dealt with
environmental themes, and continued to do so long after the show stopped ever
being funny. The cartoon saw a brief return to form for The Simpsons Movie,
where the town of Springfield’s constant pollution lead to the evil, maniacal
head of the EPA isolating the entire town under a glass dome in a way that bore
no resemblance to the Stephen King book “The Dome” that came out shortly
afterwards.

We see that our careless, selfish attitude to the
environment utterly destroys it, hence the giant glass dome. Except that at the
end of the film the dome is destroyed and everything goes exactly back to
normal. Like, exactly back to normal. Nothing is done about the deadly nuclear
power plant or the heaps of toxic
waste being dumped in the lake. It’s forgotten about.

Saturday, 6 April 2013

Last night I finished
Bioshock Infinite. Then I went and ate a pizza and had a long sit down because
frankly, I was over-stimulated like an angry toddler and needed to calm down
before nap-time.

Oh, and after the very
next line break I am going to start raining down a hellfire of spoilers which
you do not want to read unless you’ve played the game yet. Seriously, this is a
great game but it’s also a game you don’t want to have spoiled, so off you
fuck. Oh, and for good measure I’m probably going to spoil the movie Trance,
although to be honest that’s less of a tragedy.

Bye bye.

Okay, is everybody
left? Yeah? That guy at the back? Are you cool? Good, I thought you were but I
just wanted to check.

Spoilers start here.

I really hope we can be done with the tired old “Are
videogames art?” thing now. This week I enjoyed two pieces of media content
that dealt with the unreliability of your own memories and ended with a
gigantic mind fuck where someone’s memories weren’t what they thought they were
and the hero of your story turned out to be something else entirely. One was
Trance, which stayed with me the entire length of the walk from my seat in the
cinema to the first set of traffic lights I passed on my way home, where I
parted ways with the friends I’d been seeing it with. The other was Bioshock
Infinite, which I can already tell is going to stay with me for a good while
longer. Does it affect you as much as say, the Mona Lisa, Mice and Men, or
Citizen Kane? Well I don’t know how much any of those three things affected
you, it turns out that stuff’s subjective, but if you can technically describe
Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo as art, then this game passes all the tests by a
mile.

But I’m not writing this to add to the white water rapids of
gushing reviews that have already been written about Bioshock Infinite, if you’re
reading this I assume you’ve played the game, so you know it’s good.

No, I wrote this to talk of one of the few criticisms
about the game that have come about (always prefaced by more gushing about what
a great game it is). Some have been saying that the game is too violent, and this
time it’s not Keith Vaz or Tipper Gore. It’s Kirk Hamilton and Kotaku,
and Cliff
Bleszinski, one of the videogame designers behind Gears of War who happily
describes himself as “the guy that brought you a chainsaw gun”. The argument
that both people make is that Bioshock Infinite is such a masterpiece of world building,
story and character that it detracts from that to have spend so much of the
game slamming a set of spinning fishhooks into people’s faces and proving right
PC Danny Butterman’s theory that there's a point on a man's head where if you
shoot it, it will blow up.

I empathise. When I first sat down to play the game last
week, after a while I tweeted this:

So far playing BioShock Infinite, I
can't help but worry that the game will be ruined if I have to start actually
fighting people.
— Chris Farnell (@thebrainofchris) March
29, 2013

And the fact that gamers and game designers are asking these
questions and expecting more from games is a good thing, and I hope that the
nuanced, character-driven game that uses mechanics other than violence to move
the plot forward comes along soon – assuming you believe we don’t already have
it in games like Grim Fandango, or Portal, or Fallout 3 which I played through
mostly by talking my way out of problems or running away (although personally,
while these are all great games none of them quite delivered the gut punches
that Bioshock Infinite was dolling out).

However, on this one case I believe they’re wrong, that the
violence in Bioshock Infinite is a core part of the story, not just an add-on
that’s there because you need shooting to break up the plot.

Yes, if this development of this game was anything like the
last one, the fact that it was a shooter probably came before the plot about
sky racists, time travel and dimension hopping. The original Bioshock was set
on a tropical
island full of genetically modified Nazis before it was set in Ayn Rand’s
extremely wet dream (do you see what I did there?), and a lot of the gameplay
mechanics had been nailed down long before there was a story. However, the
story they ended up with in Bioshock Infinite was a story that embraced the
fact it was built around a violent gameplay mechanic.

I’ve talked before about how zombie movies aren’t just
violent, they’re about
violence, and to certain extent the same is true here. When Booker and
Elizabeth walk into a ticket office, only for Booker to end up murdering
everybody in there, Elizabeth is terrified and disgusted. Throughout the game
we are given reminders of the terrible things that Booker has done, at the
battle of Wounded Knee and as a Pinkerton. We see Elizabeth go from being
horrified at the violence Booker commits, to accepting it as a necessary evil,
to performing her first murder and eventually leading a brutal attack on the
city of New York.

By the end of the game we discover that everything that
happens, from Elizabeth’s imprisonment to the city of Columbia itself are all
consequences of Booker’s attempts to escape his violent past. In one world he
escapes it by drinking too much and getting into gambling debts, in another
world he does it by becoming born again as Zachary Comstock, and building a
floating city capable of an even greater scale of violence and genocide.

Which is all very well, but that’s back story. Why does
Booker have to be ‘sploding heads left right and centre in game?

Because, while in films and books the rule is always “Show
don’t tell” in games you learn by doing. In the original Bioshock the fact that
you’re a brainwashed slave has emotional punch because you realise that it’s you who has been blindly following instructions
since the game started. When you arrive at the scene of Booker/Zachary’s
baptism at the end of the game, you don’t need to be told that it all seems
weirdly familiar, because you’re already getting déjà vu from the baptism at
the beginning of the game.

So if you’re playing a violent character it’s not enough to
know that he did violent things, you need to see that violence, and perform
that violence yourself, and see how others react to it. When you discover that
in another life your character razes cities to the ground, it’s made more
believable knowing the trail of bodies that brought you to that point.

There are some great stories that can be told with games
that don’t need any violence at all. But this story was about a violent man,
and it’s no worse for it.

Monday, 4 March 2013

So Chuck Wendig’s written a piece about all the
misinformation about the publishing industry, and asking writers to use the
mighty power of anecdote to shed some light on the process and get rid of any
conspiracy theories. I wrote a comment, it turned into a long comment, and
eventually it turned into the definitive story of how Mark II got published.
Not written, Christ I’m still not sure how you write a publishable book, but
this is how it got published, and I think it’s probably a pretty good template
to work to. So I’m sticking this up here as a link to refer to so I don’t have
to repeat myself again.

Mark
II got published by Tindal Street Press in 2006. It was, I believe, the
third book-length piece of fiction I had written and attempted to submit to
agents, so by that time I was intimately familiar with the cycle of submission
and rejection letters – my favourite remains a standard form letter I got when
I was 15 that someone had scribbled “Stick at it!” across.

I wrote a book. I redrafted the book. I got some friends who
I trusted to read it and tell me which bits were crap, then I redrafted it
again. Then I paid my sister and her friends £20 to go through looking for
typos, because she was 15 and I didn't have any scruples about child labour
when it came to siblings. Then I went through it one more time to polish it.

This wasn't the first book I'd gone through this process
with, and I already had (and still have) a nice thick folder full of rejection
letters. This time I decided, rather than spending a small fortune on printing
and postage (Again, this was 2004/2005, and no literary agent worth their salt
would dream of accepting email submissions in those days) I decided to send out
a bunch of query letters. I found my agents by going through the Writers’ and
Artists’ year book with an orange highlighter, marking out anyone who didn’t
explicitly say they hated teenage or science fiction.

The query letter consisted of three things: That I was 19
years old and was taking the creative writing course at the University of East
Anglia (a prestigious course, although I’ve no idea how much this helped- the
agent that eventually accepted me didn’t know I was taking the course when we
met), a short sentence describing my book, and a further sentence explaining
why I was interested in that agent, customised for each letter to prevent it
sounding like a mass mailing (which it was).

I sent off 28 query letters and kept a spreadsheet of the
results. I still have that spreadsheet. I don’t know exactly how many of those
agents asked to see the manuscript, but I remember it was the majority which
meant that I could include a cover letter that said “as requested, here is my synopsis and first three chapters...”

I do know that out of that 28, 5 never responded, I
eventually received 13 rejection letters, although most of them chose to read
the book first. 7 requested that I send them a synopsis and first three
chapters, and then I never heard from them again.

The one agency replied to me query letter asking to see the
whole manuscript (I expect it was a screw up on an interns part, as traditionally
they look for 3 chapters and a synopsis, as does everyone). This was the agency
that eventually called me up asking me to come and visit, and who eventually
agreed to represent the book. I suspect (though don’t know for certain) the
reason was a combination of genuine enthusiasm for the book, the passing
resemblance its tone had to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time,
and that they also had Never Let Me Go on their books and thought cloning was
going to be big that publishing year.

From there we went through the whole cycle again, they
approached numerous publishers, many of whom had nice things to say about the
book, some recommending we target YA publishers. Eventually one publisher,
Tindal Street Press took us on. Shortly afterwards it was also sold to Fazi Editore in Italy, and the Italian translation actually netted me a bigger
advance and twice as many sales. The Italian translation also allowed me to say I share a publisher with Richard Castle, which I'm eternally grateful for.

Mark II was published in 2006 by Tindal Street Press, with a
launch party in my home city of Leicester. Since then the book’s sold roughly
3,000 copies worldwide, and once a year I buy a meal with my PLR payments. I’ve
had a couple of film companies inquire about the movie rights, but as near as I
can tell film companies inquire about the rights to everything, so I’ve never
got more than a little excited about
that.

My second novel was wildly different from the first. Both
books were science fiction, but my second had actual spaceships and aliens in,
so my agents were a bit at a loss as to what to do with it. We parted on good
terms and I entered the whole cycle once again. I’m currently working on a
third book (well, fourth, but the third one is banished to a bottom drawer for
the time being) and have received a lot of “loved it, but don’t know how to
sell it” style rejections for book two, which I’m considering attempting to
self publish, since I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how to sell it.

So that’s how Mark II went from being a lengthy word
document on my laptop to an actual book with pages and a cover and everything.
Although name-dropping UEA probably gave me a bit of a boost in the being-taken-seriously
stakes, I started out with zero contacts and no more insight into the
publishing industry than you can get by reading about it and by building up a
stack of rejection letters. If I had to put Mark II’s getting down to any
quality other than “it being a good book” (naturally, they’re all good books) I’d say it’s a
willingness to accept many, many rejection letters as a natural part of the
process, not the end of the world (some times that's easier than others), taking the time to get the presentation
right, and being very, very lucky.